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Summary of the impact

Dr Mel Gibson's research on comics and gender has influenced Thought
Bubble — an organisation that runs the UK's largest and most high-profile
comic and graphic novel festival — to re-focus its marketing and festival
content to appeal to female audiences. Thought Bubble is dedicated to
promoting comics and related media as an important national and
international cultural art-form. In a medium stereotyped as profoundly
male, Gibson's research has provided the basis for Thought Bubble's
distinctive approach to gender-related issues as they relate to the world
of comics, their creators and their readers, with implications
particularly for the marketing of the festival.

Underpinning research

Gibson, who has worked at Northumbria in Film, Literature and Childhood
Studies since 1998, is a key figure in UK comics scholarship and has a
strong record of dissemination of her research to non-academic audiences
and to professionals within the comics industry, primarily through her
popular website Dr Mel Comics. Her expertise in her subject field has
underpinned the impact described in this case study. Gibson's research is
ongoing and there are significant outputs in the current REF census
period. This work has predominantly focused on gender, comics and
childhood, with a significant emphasis on addressing myths and prejudices
about the comic form and its audiences, for example, Gibson, 2003b.

The most important focus of Gibson's research regarding the impact
described in this case study has been around comics and female audiences.
A dominant discourse about comics within the industry and within much
comic-based criticism is that girls and women do not read comics to any
great extent. As a female reader of comics Gibson wanted to investigate
this assumption through her research. This involved uncovering via
archival research a "lost" history of comics for the female reader
(Gibson, 2000a, 2000b, 20003a). This research has also involved working
with female readers of all genres of comic as well as engaging with female
creators of comics (Gibson, 2010).

Her research findings have established that there was, and is, a
significant female comics readership in Britain and also identified and
analysed the kind of narratives which were and are popular with female
readers, revealing a diverse range of engagement with many genres
including superhero titles and autobiography. The overall effect of
Gibson's research has been to challenge those discourses and approaches to
comics that have excluded or marginalised women as both readers and
creative figures nationally and internationally.

References to the research

Gibson, M (2000a) `On British comics for girls and their readers'. In
Moody, N. (ed.) Consuming for Pleasure: Selected essays on popular
fiction, John Moores Press.

Gibson, M (2010) `What Bunty did next: exploring some of the ways in
which the British girls' comic protagonists were revisited and revised in
late twentieth-century comics and graphic novels' Journal of Graphic
Novels and Comics Routledge, pp. 121-135. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2010.528639

Details of the impact

The focus of this case study is Thought Bubble, a non-profit-making
organisation which runs one of Britain's most important comic festivals
and also houses the British Comics Awards. The festival has significant
international reach. In 2012 it had 75 major speakers participating,
including visitors from France, Spain, Brazil, Canada, the USA, Japan and
China, as well as an additional 200 creators selling their comics and
running workshops. Sponsors include the Arts Council, the University of
Chichester and major international comic distributor Diamond.

Gibson's research has contributed to the development of Thought Bubble's
distinctive approach, most evidently in the foregrounding of
gender-related elements in the programming of its yearly festival. The
festival started in 2007 as a one-day event attracting around 500 people.
Gibson's body of research on the roles of women and girls in the world of
comics was presented to festival staff, including the festival director in
2008. The research indicated that a female audience existed for comics to
a much greater extent than previously supposed and that it could be
fostered by changing the tone and marketing of the festival and also by
emphasising women creators in the programming.

The presentation of research led directly to Gibson's organising and
chairing a regular "Women in Comics" panel for the festival from 2009 to
2012 that debated issues of gender and diversity. This has become an
increasingly important aspect of the festival, attracting major women
comic creators such as Alison Bechdel, Robin Furth and Mary Talbot and
with its audience rising from 60 in its first year to a current 250. It
has been consistently shaped by Gibson's research findings, which have
been used to form the agendas that are addressed by each of the panels.
Examples of this include a panel on generation and comics, influenced by
Gibson, 2010 (an article which addressed the influences on women creators)
and a panel on the supposed lack of female creators and readers, which
drew upon Gibson 2003a, 2003b, 2010. The Director of the Thought Bubble
Festival from its inception, confirms that: "Mel's research gave me
considerable impetus to shape the form of the festival by changing the
tone of the marketing and forefronting women creators in the
programming...This led to the start of the Women in Comics panel,
chaired by Mel and to our annual banner used on the website and all
publicity for the festival always featuring/being created by a woman."

Elsewhere the Thought Bubble Director has noted that the "Women in
Comics" panel: "has been a distinctive feature of Thought Bubble"
and that "the celebration of female creators has acted as a
`shop-front' for the festival, showing visitors and guests that this is
a female friendly event" (source: personal correspondence between
the Director of Thought Bubble and Gibson).

Furthermore, Thought Bubble's Assistant Director has confirmed that
Gibson's contributions to the festival programme were: "instrumental in
allowing us to successfully attain (and retain) the necessary (Arts
Council) funding to allow us to both succeed in our initial core aims,
and also to expand and grow as an organisation."

Sources to corroborate the impact

Letter of support from Thought Bubble Director, corroborating impacts
claimed on foregrounding of gender-related elements in festival
programming.